Chicago's Union Station is an iconic but creaky machine for moving people — equal parts Roman grandeur and rat maze. From crowded train platforms to foul-smelling air, the station regularly foists indignities on its passengers. It even metes out injury, like the one suffered by a woman whose head was bloodied by a chunk of concrete that fell from an office building above the station in September

So Wednesday's reopening of the station's former Women's Lounge — a handsomely-restored, high-ceilinged room that has been turned into an event space — is cause for celebration but demands to be put into perspective: It is one small step on the long and painfully slow road of bringing the 91-year-old station into the 21st century. And that road is full of potential potholes.

Federal funding still must be secured for a long list of upgrades — no sure thing once president-elect Donald J. Trump replaces Barack Obama in the White House. If the improvements are not made, new structures envisioned for atop the station and the blocks around it could overtax the already-jammed facility. Amtrak, the station's owner, plans to select a developer for those structures by late April.

More is at stake here than the future of the nation's third busiest train station, which on an average weekday serves about 120,000 passengers, the vast majority of them commuters. Union Station is widely viewed as a sleeping giant that could further catalyze West Loop real estate growth and realize anew the architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham's vision for majestic train stations that would serve as grand gateways to Chicago.

That is hardly what Union Station is now, even though it retains its grandly-scaled headhouse building on the west side of Canal Street, home to the soaring Great Hall. East of Canal, the station is crammed into the basement of an office complex erected in 1971 after Union Station's financially struggling owners allowed the demolition of the original concourse, a classically-styled, light-filled structure supported by arching metal vaults.

"Most of the criticisms of this place are legitimate," Ray Lang, president of Chicago Union Station Co., an Amtrak subsidiary, said on a recent afternoon as harried passengers squeezed down an escalator in the overcrowded concourse to their Metra trains. The commuter railroad is the station's main tenant.

Developers unveil new plans for the redevelopment of Union Station on June 25, 2018. The 2018 proposal will add a hotel, apartments, offices and new retail tenants to the train station. Some aspects of the plan have changed since the first redevelopment announcement in 2017.

(Chicago Tribune)

The Union Station that opened in 1925 was shaped for an era that predated interstate highways, jet flight, express mail services like FedEx, and shifting gender roles that would fundamentally reshape American life. The designers were Burnham's successors, the Chicago firm of Graham, Burnham & Co., which later became Graham, Anderson, Probst & White.

The station primarily served long-distance intercity trains, not short-haul commuter trains that bring in passengers from the suburbs. It was outfitted with column-free platforms, set parallel to passenger platforms with columns, to support the profitable business of handling baggage and mail. Reflecting the social customs of the Edwardian era, the station even provided a decorous refuge for ladies awaiting their next train.

That was the genesis of the former Women's Lounge, which has been renamed the Burlington Room in honor of a vaunted rail company whose tracks extended throughout the Midwest. Its restoration was precipitated by Amtrak's $3 million upgrade of sprinklers and heating systems on the headhouse's west side. The railroad has turned that necessity into a potential moneymaker.

Back in the day, the Women's Lounge haven must have seemed like heaven, with its elegant proportions and ornate architectural detail, not to mention 12 telephone booths, paid showers and an adjacent beauty parlor. Yet by the time the station opened, flappers with boyish "bob" haircuts were challenging old norms and the women's lounge was already on its way to becoming obsolete. Only a few years ago, long after the room had been closed to the public, Amtrak used it as a storage spot for train schedules, brochures and other paper goods. A dropped ceiling concealed its big spaces and fine-grained decoration.

"We were just sort of shocked," an Amtrak official said. "It looked like the attic on top of your garage."

A meticulous restoration by Chicago's Goettsch Partners, led by the firm's Leonard Koroski, has brought back original chandeliers, French wallpaper with an exotic Asian streak, and a surprisingly earthy palette of beiges, golds and greens. As a result, the room is simultaneously in harmony with the cool imperial grandeur of the Great Hall and a respite from it — more intimate, softer, warmer, and (dare one say it these days?) more feminine.

Deftly inserting new heating and lighting, the architects have carefully modernized the space so it can host banquets, conferences and other events. Wednesday's program will welcome Landmarks Illinois, the Chicago-based preservation advocacy group, which is giving the project an award.

Still, I had to wonder: Does the room amount to a "let them eat cake" slap at commuters — high design in the Burlington Room versus cramped conditions in the concourse? Amtrak officials say no, because the restored room is part of larger plan that ultimately will benefit passengers.

Amtrak has been shifting a variety of its functions, including the expanded Metropolitan Lounge for first-class passengers, into the headhouse. Those moves, Amtrak officials say, will allow the railroad to carve out room in the concourse so its corridors can be widened, sightlines can be opened up and street-level entrances can be made more spacious. Better ventilation and wider passenger platforms, which would be created by eliminating Union Station's outmoded baggage platforms, are also part of that vision.

Last July, this strategy inched forward when the respected global engineering company Arup was awarded a $6 million contract for preliminary design work on Union Station upgrades. Yet Mayor Rahm Emanuel and regional transportation officials acknowledged that the improvements hinge on financial backing from Washington and Springfield. At best, Amtrak officials acknowledge, the planned improvements are four to five years off.

A bigger question mark surrounds what will unfold in January when Amtrak entertains conceptual plans for Union Station, as well as land and air rights around the station, from four teams of developers and architects, including such powerhouse Chicago design firms as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Studio Gang Architects.

Amtrak anticipates that the plans will propose new uses for vacant floors in the eight-story Union Station building as well as additional floors that could be supported by the original foundations. The usual gamut of "mixed-use" components — a hotel, offices, residences and shops — are among the possibilities. The proposals are also likely to include plans for two Amtrak-owned parcels south of Jackson Boulevard, including one occupied by an Amtrak parking deck and a new city bus terminal called the Union Station Transit Center.

What will the plans look like? One hint came in September when Crain's Chicago Business revealed images of a striking, slant-walled, 958-foot-tall office building designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for one of the four competing developers, Sterling Bay. The design, which would likely replace the eyesore parking garage, could contain as much as 2 million square feet of office space.

To be sure, Amtrak's previous attempts to redevelop the station have fallen apart. But Lang, president of the Chicago Union Station Co., predicted this time will be different because the area to be developed is larger than just the station and thus more attractive to developers. Assuming the project moves ahead, questions need to be raised about its impact on the cityscape:

•Will the crowded station be able to accommodate heavier passenger loads that invariably would be created by dense surrounding development? Struggling Amtrak, eager for revenue, and city officials, desperately in need of property tax dollars, hardly seem to be in a position to judge the question impartially. Density is welcome, but how much is too much?

•Will the selected developer's plan seek to leave in place — or build new facilities atop — the Union Station Transit Center? The $20 million center, crisply designed by Chicago's Muller+Muller Architects, has provided a convenient pedway connection to the station for bus passengers and alleviated traffic congestion on Canal Street. It would be a travesty if the station, now open and airy, were turned into the darkened base of a high-rise.

•Can redevelopment make Union Station more inviting to passersby and easier to enter from the street? Plans call for altering the alignment of the perpetually jammed Adams Street entrance, yet attention also should be directed to improving portals along Clinton Street, where the austere headhouse can only be entered from small, tightly-framed openings at the corners. Punching an entrance through the center of the Clinton facade would make the station more welcoming for the crowds pouring in from the booming West Loop.

Chicago Department of Transportation and Amtrak officials say that they have been weighing such issues for years and brush aside any concerns, particularly about overdevelopment. "We see the station improvements working in tandem with the improvements to the neighborhood," said Mike Claffey, a department spokesman. Lang noted that revenue from surrounding development could fund improvements to the station.

That is the ideal scenario, yet commuters will have to be patient. For now, the station's frenzied commuter crush summons the architectural historian Vincent Scully's line about the reviled underground facility that replaced New York City's legendary Pennsylvania Station. The grand Beaux Arts structure was demolished in 1963 and 1964, anticipating the 1969 sacking of Union Station's concourse.

Contrasting the soaring spaces of the old Penn Station with the sordid conditions of the new one, Scully wrote that "one entered the city like a god. ... One scuttles in now like a rat."